My 3D Software Biography
I’ve decided to write my own 3D software biography having watched Entagma’s nerd rant on their software biography. It’s interesting, at least to me, that there are many interesting ways of entry into this beautiful world of 3D computer graphics. I’ll also leave my opinions and impressions of the software based on what I last used, tested or researched on them. You’re most welcome to disagree with my opinions and impressions and I’m interested to hear your point of view. Likely, the differences in opinion will stem from the fact that we use the software for different purposes. Still, happy to hear from you!
| Software | Type | First Used | Last Used | Opinions and Last impressions |
| TrueSpace | Full DCC | 2003 | 2004 | My first 3D software, it had a raytracer and floating shelfs. It was cool. |
| Swift3D | Modelling | 2004 | 2005 | A very friendly looking 3D software I used to get 3D designs into Flash and onto websites. Did I just mention Flash? That’s probably indicative of how irrelevant this software is |
| LightWave 3D | Full DCC | 2005 | 2005 | It was good while it lasted, had some nice modelling workflows. |
| Rhinoceros 3D | Modelling | 2005 | 2005 | Did some modelling in there once to realise that the whole software was meant more for actual production/fabrication modelling than for design/animation purposes. |
| Mental Ray | Renderer | 2005 | 2016 | Produces photo-realistic results had quite a messing shading module, but it works. |
| 3ds Max | Full DCC | 2007 | 2009 | Great for architechtural visualization but I suspect it’s largely due to the legacy library of presets and materials built over the years |
| Wings 3D | Modelling | 2007 | 2007 | A free poly-modelling toolkit that looked promising back in day, but there’s Blender now, so… |
| Maya | Full DCC | 2008 | 2021 | The go-to for character animation but the development of new tools is slow and often disjointed |
| Zbrush | Modelling | 2008 | 2021 | The go-to for sculpting, not so great for hard-surface stuff, people keep complaining about its strange navigation from other 3D softwares and I agree, but I’ve also developed the intuition for it in 2 weeks so it’s not that big of a deal |
| Mudbox | Modelling | 2009 | 2015 | A Zbrush with less strange navigation, but didn’t have Dynamesh or powerful retopologizing tools so it lost the race to Zbrush, but got shoved into Maya as a sculpting module. Great move. |
| Motionbuilder | Motion Capture | 2009 | 2009 | Used it for optical motion capture and clean up, but now we use inertia based mocap and the clean up module is somewhat half implemented directly into Maya, so it’s not so relevant as of 2021 |
| Modo | Modelling | 2010 | 2010 | Used to be extremely hyped for it’s modelling prowess, can’t say the same now |
| SketchUp | Modelling | 2011 | 2011 | It was not very flexible or intuitive, but then again, I last used it in 2011 |
| Nuke | Compositing | 2013 | 2021 | The go-to for compositing, I just wish it’s more affordable |
| Softimage | Full DCC | 2015 | 2016 | It was very similar to Maya, except slightly more powerful, slightly less popular, so I can understand why it was acquired and killed |
| Cinema 4D | Full DCC | 2017 | 2017 | The go-to for 3D motion graphics, useful for a single designer environments |
| Zmodeller | Modelling | 2017 | 2017 | When you want to poly-model hard surfaces in Zbrush. If you come from a more “traditional” software like Maya, it doesn’t offer much more than those legacy poly-modelling tools. |
| Arnold CPU | Renderer | 2017 | 2019 | Very powerful and intuitive shading module, beautiful and natural-looking details and colors, too slow for small studios / freelancers. |
| V-Ray | Renderer | 2017 | 2018 | Shading module is very similar to mental ray so I felt at home when transiting to V-Ray, except that the IPR was actually interactive. Of course, then GPU rendering came along. |
| Fusion | Compositing | 2018 | 2018 | Tried it once, not as intuitive as Nuke, but a much more cost-effective |
| Blender | Full DCC | 2018 | 2021 | The go-to for getting started in 3D because it’s free and capable, and the development is exciting and fun |
| Mixamo | Motion Capture | 2018 | 2021 | Superb library for motion capture clips. I have found it largely largely difficult to implement library motion clips into real-world projects because we usually need customized action and there’s still quite a bit of retime and collision fixes to make on top of library clips. |
| V-Ray GPU | Renderer | 2018 | 2019 | Very capable and decently fast renderer with nice details and colors. SSS is relatively slow, but usable. |
| Houdini | Full DCC | 2019 | 2021 | The go-to for VFX and procedural animation, steep learning curve for people unfamiliar with node-based workflows |
| Arnold GPU | Renderer | 2019 | 2021 | Either broken or very unstable the last I tried in early 2021. The CPU on the other hand still is beautiful. |
| Mantra | Renderer | 2019 | 2019 | Houdini’s built-in renderer. The time to first pixel can go up to a minute for a simple scene, while renderers like Redshift is a couple of seconds, so I find this renderer not very usuable in a small-studio design oriented production environment |
| Redshift | Renderer | 2019 | 2021 | Extremely capable and blazing fast renderer with decent details and colors. Perfect for small studios. |
| Resolve | Coloring | 2020 | 2021 | The go-to for coloring / grading |
| 3DCoat | Modelling | 2020 | 2020 | Don’t know much about it except I tried their auto-retopologizing tool. Pretty good results, but Exoside’s Quadremesher results were still better |
| Cycles | Renderer | 2021 | 2021 | Nice production renderer with speeds comparable to other paid renderers. It’s mind-blowing |
| Eevee | Renderer | 2021 | 2021 | Nice volume lights, great for mood and concepts |
| Daz Studio | Generator | – | – | Haven’t used it but it looks like a character generator for fantasy / game-ish characters |
| Speedtree | Generator | – | – | The go-to for 3D trees |
| Clarisse | Renderer | – | – | Learnt of this software in mid-2021, and I find it interesting, but that’s about it. Sounds like a little Solaris of sorts which I find mildly cumbersome but I acknowledge its ability to handle large amounts of geometry efficiently. |
| Octane | Renderer | – | – | Back when I was using Mental Ray and V-Ray, Octane looked extremely tempting |
| RenderMan XPU | Renderer | – | – | XPU delivers identical pixels from both CPUs and GPUs, but it’s on an indefinitely release date as of mid 2021, so who knows if it’s actually practical? |
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